NINETEEN
Estrella tore open a bag of cotton candy. She would wait until Bay started talking. She twirled off a piece of spun sugar, and then handed the cotton candy to Fel. She hoped he’d join her, both of them giving off the sense that they had all night. They would stay until the silence wore Bay down.
Fel did the same thing she’d done, pulling away a scrap, and then passed it to Bay. He looked at the fluff sticking to his fingers. He seemed unsure if it was candy or fabric, and for a minute she wondered if he saw it like she had the first time her mother bought it for her, like blush-colored clouds whirled onto a paper cone.
Most of the time, Fel’s wonder made her protective. It made her slow and careful with him. But now it frustrated her. Right now, everything frustrated her.
“You eat it, Fel,” she said. “You just put it in your mouth.”
He did it, his eyes on her as he swallowed it. That startled look made her a little guilty, but she caught the glint of something else. His interest maybe. His amusement at her getting this worked up over spun sugar.
Bay tore off a piece of cotton candy but didn’t eat it. She set the bag between the three of them, the puff leaning to one side on the rusted landing.
Bay. Alive. Hair dyed auburn, cut short, the longest pieces now free from her hat and brushing her cheekbones. Bay had forgone her satin coats in favor of slacks and collared shirts that made her the same as a hundred men.
Whatever thrill Estrella felt to see her turned damp and heavy. She should have thrown her arms around her, shrieked with the joy of knowing her heart and her cousins’ hearts had not killed her.
But the only words in her were bitter.
“Nice haircut,” she said.
“Thank you.” Bay took off her hat and ran a hand through her cropped hair. “I miss the braid a little, to tell you the truth. This keeps getting in my face. But I don’t miss being called Miss Briar, I’ll tell you that.”
A faint laugh turned in Estrella’s throat, but she didn’t let it become sound. In all the time Estrella had watched her, Bay had never been bothered either by being called a girl or a boy. But that word, Miss, engraved on invitations or written in calligraphy on envelopes, had made Bay shudder. To Bay, Miss spoke of what the rest of the Briars would expect her to be. A proper young woman in neutral, pearled pumps, diamond drop earrings, a knee-length lace dress.
The kind of woman everyone except Marjorie expected her to be.
“Which part?” Estrella asked. “Just the miss or the Briar, too?”
“Both,” Bay said.
“What do we call you?” Fel asked.
It was such a genuine question, his voice so open, that it made Estrella cross her arms just to remind Bay she was not forgiven.
“On the street, don’t call me anything.” Bay’s eyes flashed from the fire escape landing to the wet ground below. “Down there, you don’t know me. But right now, up here, call me Bay. I’m the same girl.”
The word girl prickled against the back of Estrella’s neck, her skin hot with the rush of being near Bay. This version of Bay had abandoned her French braid. She wore the understated colors of men’s clothes. She was beautiful either way, and it was a sharp, stinging reminder of what Estrella and her cousins all shared.
“You’re not the same,” Estrella said. “You let us think you were dead. The Bay I knew would never do that.”
“I know,” Bay said. “But I had reasons, Estrella. I would never do this to your family if I didn’t have a good reason.”
“Everyone is mourning you,” Estrella said. “Do you understand that?”
“I’m sorry,” Bay said, her head down, voice low, looking so guilty that Estrella almost declared her forgiven. “But this is important. I can’t explain it right now, but I have to do this.”
“What’s important enough to let everyone think you’re dead?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“You did this for something that doesn’t matter?”
The cotton candy bag listed a little further. Fel righted it, but it leaned again. And that small defeat, the forlorn puff in a crumpled bag, seemed to open Bay.
Bay sighed, and then she spoke. She told them how she had known Reid wanted more than he was saying. How he had reminded her that she was no Briar heir, and that it was only by Reid’s gracious generosity that he let Bay stay. How he had tried to threaten her with the fate of the Nomeolvides women, how with the twist of the right rumor, they would be hunted as witches.
How about you help me, or I force them off this land and they die?
Estrella shivered, wondering how much Reid knew about La Pradera’s hold on them, if he had heard any stories of runaway girls coughing up pollen until the breath left them.
“But La Pradera is yours,” Estrella said, hoping Bay would refute everything Calla had said. The problem with Marjorie’s will. The mistakes the lawyers had made. The words—fee tail, devise—that Estrella still did not understand. “Marjorie left it to you.”
“It’s not that simple,” Bay said. “But I’m not giving up. That’s why I’m here. I needed Reid to stop watching me.”
“What will you do while he’s not watching you?” Fel asked.
Bay offered her surest smile. “Gather ammunition.”
Estrella scooted a little closer. “What do you have?”
“Nothing,” she said.
Before Estrella’s shoulders slumped, Bay held up a hand.
“I’m working on it,” she said. “The Briars have secrets. Everybody does.”
“You know Reid’s, don’t you?” Estrella asked.
Bay shook her head. “Not big enough. I need more. And I’ll find it.”
Estrella watched the flickering of Bay’s eyes, even brighter with her hair dyed dark. Next to Fel, with his skin the color of wet brush, his eyes as deep brown as the rusted fire escape’s metal, Bay’s face looked even paler, her freckles as delicate as spilled cinnamon. They were both a kind of family to her, one she and her cousins had grown up next to, the other found in her family’s garden and taken into their home like a lost son.
She did not know what to do with them now, the boy she feared for the beautiful and frightening things he might mean, and the love she and her cousins shared. Even though Bay had told all these lies, even though her mother warned her that Fel was a boy who did not sleep, that protectiveness still lit up inside her, for both of them.
“How has no one recognized you by now?” Estrella almost whispered it. “People here knew Marjorie. And they know you.”
“I’m out of my Bay Briar costume,” Bay said, gesturing to her haircut, her suspenders, her plain polished shoes, the hat she’d set on the landing. “You’d be amazed how no one looks past that. Most of the time, people don’t look past what they think they know.”